It was the kind of task any competent seamstress has completed hundreds of times before: altering denim jeans and jerseys. But there was something different about this piece of work. Though our team of scientists were paying for it, we weren’t her ultimate customers – the clothes were to be worn by dead pigs.
The pigs and their specially tailored outfits were central to research conducted by ourselves, Devin Finaughty and our colleagues from South Africa’s University of Cape Town (UCT), a group of forensic scientists known as taphonomists. We study the environmental forces that drive changes to a body after death. A key aspect is estimating time-since-death, the length of time between death and a body being recovered. Ascertaining this detail can help to identify the person and reconstruct the circumstances around their death.
